


good, upstanding citizens

by beelzebubble_tea



Category: Original Work
Genre: Asian Character(s), Coffee Shops, F/M, Female Character of Color, Fluff and Humor, Male Character of Color, Optional Details Are Optional, not a case fic, not as cool as it sounds, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:13:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26323198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beelzebubble_tea/pseuds/beelzebubble_tea
Summary: On a grey autumn afternoon, the greatest detective in the city resigns from his job.Someone is desperate to know why.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character, Thief/Detective - Relationship
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7
Collections: Het Swap Exchange 2020





	good, upstanding citizens

The dark-haired man straightened the stack of papers. Something was missing, so he glanced around the office until he spotted what he was looking for: a black stapler sitting on the corner of his superior’s desk. “Excuse me.” With a swift press, the papers were neatly stapled together, and the man held them out to his superior.

Instead of taking the packet, the man’s superior frowned at him in concern. “Are you sure about this, Sal?” he asked with the air of one who has posed this question many times before but still hopes, fruitlessly, to receive a different answer.

The dark-haired man smiled tightly. “I’m sure.”

“Well, I suppose it’s up to you…” His superior reluctantly took the sheaf of papers and laid it gingerly on his desk as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” said the man. He gave a perfunctory nod as he turned and walked out the door, up the corridor, down two flights of stairs, and out into the crisp autumn afternoon. He walked like a man set free.

* * *

Salvador took the metro home.

There was a woman who rode the metro at the same time as Salvador every weekday. She always boarded before he did and was still on the train when he disembarked. Consequently, he didn’t know where she got off—or anything else about the woman—despite standing a meter away from her for half an hour every day for the past two years. He knew her face, at least. She was rather pretty, all inky hair and narrow brown eyes and faint terracotta freckles scattered across her pale skin. Still unremarkable as far as faces went, but Salvador thought he could easily pick her out of a crowd.

They had never spoken a single word to each other, so it was a surprise when the woman leaned over and said quietly, “Hey, sorry if this is weird, but are you alright? It’s just—you seem a bit off today.”

Salvador blinked at her, taken aback. “Oh, um. I’m fine, thank you for asking. I’ve just resigned from my job, so it’s a rather big change, you know.” He wasn’t quite sure why he was telling her this and decided to leave it at that.

The woman goggled at him, looking oddly aghast. Her mouth opened and shut without a sound. Just when she finally seemed about to respond, the train pulled into Salvador’s station, doors sliding open. He offered her an apologetic nod, then turned and walked off the train.

It took him far too long to notice the footsteps. Salvador spun around to see the woman emerging from the metro station behind him, her black hair fluttering in the sharp, restless air.

“Are you _following_ me?”

“Did you really resign?” the woman called instead of answering his question. She hurried over to him and gazed imploringly at him with wide eyes. Her cheeks were flushed, either from distress or the brisk wind whipping her scarf about.

“Yes? Why do you care?”

“You really resigned?” the woman repeated. “Really?”

“Yes, really. Excuse me,” Salvador said shortly, turning on his heel and striding away from the bewildering encounter. The woman seemed to have other ideas, for she darted ahead of him and barricaded his path.

“But why?” she cried.

“Why are you asking me this?” Salvador tried again to escape but was again thwarted. Did this stranger even know what his job was? What, was she a true crime enthusiast who stalked detectives for fun?

“I just don’t understand—” the woman persisted.

He dodged to the left but was blocked. “What—”

“—I mean—”

To the right. Blocked again. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, get out of the goddamned way—!”

“Please, just tell me—”

Salvador lost his patience. “Why the fuck do you want to know?” he demanded.

“Because there’s not a single other detective in the entire city that can give me a challenge!” she hurled back, then immediately clapped a hand over her mouth. Salvador stared. “Um. Shit. Pretend I didn’t say that, okay? Haha…” The woman backed away slowly, pointing awkward finger guns in his direction, and turned to leave.

Salvador grabbed her arm in a vice grip. “Wait.”

She tried to wrench out of his grasp—and nearly succeeded—but Salvador twisted her arm behind her back and pinned her against the wall of a nearby brick building. Her hair tickled his face. She laughed nervously, as best as she could with her cheek pressed to a wall.

“Wow, this is sort of hot. You’re the type of guy who just goes for it, huh?” She gave a token effort to wiggle out of his hold.

Salvador pressed her harder into the brick and crossly bade his lower body stop reacting to her movements. This was _not_ the time. “If I let you go, are you going to run?”

“Well yeah, probably,” she said.

Salvador opened his mouth to retort.

“Well!” interrupted a stooped, white-haired man who appeared to be out on an early evening stroll. His wrinkled face looked beyond scandalized. “I know you youngsters are always feeling very frisky, but for the sake of my poor heart, please keep this type of private activity to yourselves!”

Salvador spluttered. “What—no—we’re not—”

“Yessir. Sorry, sir!” The woman used Salvador’s flustered distraction to slip free. He expected her to run, but instead she looped her arm through his, smiling innocently at the old man and muttering under her breath, “See, I’m not going to go haring off. So can we go have a normal conversation like good, upstanding citizens?”

~

They made their way to the nearest cafe or restaurant, which was a tiny coffee shop called Bean There, Drunk That. As they slid into a worn leather booth along the wall, the woman removed her scarf and coat. She was wearing a plain v-necked blouse underneath, and a glimpse of silver chain glinted along the neckline— _stop looking at her cleavage!_ The woman dedicated herself to fidgeting with the menu while Salvador glared suspiciously at her.

“What’s your name?” It was a simple enough question that she should have no problem answering, and it would open her up for further inquiry.

“I’m Freia Lin,” the woman replied easily, looking up from the menu. Somewhat surprisingly, she didn’t appear to be lying. “Call me Freia.” She tilted her head. “Salvador Rosin, right?”

Salvador winced. “It’s Ra- _zin_ ,” he corrected. Then his brain caught up. “How the hell do you know my name?”

“I’m kind of a fan,” Freia Lin said, laughter in her voice.

 _There’s not a single other detective in the entire city that can give me a challenge!_ Her voice rang through his head, and he narrowed his eyes at her. Was she… a criminal? Or was she talking about a more harmless challenge? Salvador knew people who spent hours trying to figure out the most inane details about celebrities’ lives; maybe Freia really was a true crime enthusiast with a peculiar taste in idols. But then wouldn’t she have tried to talk to him on the train?

Before he could voice any of these thoughts, a waiter arrived at their booth and politely asked for their orders. 

“I don’t want anything, thanks.” Salvador spared the waiter only a fleeting glance before returning his stare to Freia.

“I’ll have a caramel affogato, please,” Freia said brightly.

“Alright, is that all?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The waiter left, but the interruption had already broken the admittedly stilted flow of Salvador and Freia’s exchange. They sat in silence for nearly a minute until Salvador spoke up. “What did you mean by what you said earlier?”

Freia gazed dumbly at him. “What did I say earlier?”

“You said that I was the only detective in the city who could give you a challenge,” Salvador reminded, impatient with her transparent stalling attempt.

“Oh, _that_ ,” said Freia in apparent realization. Salvador waited, but she failed to continue.

“Well? Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“I swear to God—”

Freia held up a hand. “Fine, fine, calm down.”

Just then, the waiter returned carrying Freia’s dessert. “Your caramel affogato,” he announced needlessly as he set it before her.

Freia gave the waiter a smile so sunny and warm that he went brilliantly red. “Thank you so much.”

“Yeah… You’re welcome…” The waiter wandered away in a daze.

Salvador himself had blinked a little in the face of that winsome smile, and he wondered for a moment what it would be like to have it directed at him. He batted away the thought. Across the table, Freia turned back towards him, her face suddenly serious.

“I never planned on telling anyone,” she said, toying with her spoon, “but since you’re resigning from the only detective agency in the city, I suppose there’s no point in hiding it from you. I’m… kind of the Shadow Thief.”

Salvador stared at her. He was not as astonished as he probably should have been—somehow, he’d half-expected those words to come out of her mouth. Still… “Prove it.”

“I thought you’d say that.” Freia set her spoon down and reached for the silver chain Salvador had spotted before, challenging his attempts to keep his eyes away from her chest. She fished an absolutely massive diamond pendant out of her blouse. “Recognize this?”

The diamond was a flawless deep blue, pear-shaped gem surrounded by glittering white diamonds and attached to an incongruously modest chain of white gold. Being no expert jeweler, Salvador only knew such details about the pendant because he’d spent three weeks earlier this year searching for the wretched thing.

“You’re wearing that around?” he cried out. Then, remembering himself, he took a semi-calming breath and lowered his voice. “That case was _hell_. They didn’t let me drop it for ages, even though nobody could find so much as a smidgeon of evidence! And you’re just wearing the damn necklace around like it’s a plastic choker from the mall?”

“You’ve got to admit it’s pretty funny,” Freia said, laughing at his chagrined look. She tucked the diamond pendant back into her shirt— _don’t look there!_ —and took another bite of her affogato. “Mm, that’s good.”

Salvador shook his head. “Why would you tell me this? Don’t you know I’m going to turn you in?”

“Why would you?” She asked the question with mere curiosity, sans the urgency that had filled her voice before.

“Why would I? Because you’re a criminal!”

“I guess…” Freia said slowly, as if this straightforward fact warranted heavy skepticism. “But it’s not like I’m a murderer. I’ve never hurt anyone.”

Salvador couldn’t think of a quick enough response. What she’d said was true, after all. Though in her years-long “career” the Shadow Thief had stolen everything from priceless jewelry to famous paintings, she had never so much as given anyone a papercut, slipping silently in and out and leaving whatever guards were there to discover the theft hours later. It was what she was known for.

“You still broke the law,” Salvador said at last.

Freia shrugged. “So? You’re not legally obligated to report me. I didn’t hurt anyone; no harm, no foul.” She popped the last of the caramel affogato into her mouth. “Okay, I’m done. Let’s go.”

“We haven’t paid,” Salvador had the presence of mind to point out.

Freia shrugged, digging a leather wallet out of her coat, and dropped a stack of paper money on the table. “I don’t feel like waiting around for the bill.”

“Did you even count that?” Salvador asked as she pulled on her coat. (He hadn’t bothered removing his.)

“I only carry hundreds,” she said.

Well. She did regularly steal items with seven-digit price tags. At least the waiter would be pleasantly surprised by his 5000-or-so-percent tip. Salvador followed Freia out of the cafe and into the frigid, biting air, shoving his hands into his pockets to protect them from the wind. The sky above was bright and cold.

He was still wrangling with himself over the issue of Freia’s crimes as the two of them meandered down the sidewalk, passing bookstores and antique shops.

It wasn’t his place to decide who deserved to escape the law, he thought. It was there for a reason, wasn’t it? But it was undeniable that no one had at all been hurt by her heists—Salvador didn’t consider losing a hunk of polished mineral or an old painting to be very injurious. He bit his lip, torn.

“It’s my turn to interrogate you now,” Freia declared abruptly. “Really, why did you resign?”

He should be turning her in. He should _not_ be having a surprisingly pleasant stroll with her down the walk, much less spilling his guts to her. But Salvador was too tired to care, and he was no longer a detective anyway, and a very emphatic part of him did not want to give up this bizarre, brazen woman who nonchalantly confessed to crimes and wore a stolen pendant worth millions around her neck.

“I haven’t been in a good place,” he admitted. He tilted his head to look up at the white-grey sky. “Not all of my cases are like yours, you know, without a single assault or injury. A lot of times I’m assigned to homicides, kidnappings, the like. And it’s… hard. It’s really hard. Add in seventy-hour work weeks, sometimes more depending on the case, and it’s not, well—it’s not ideal.”

They neared a wooden bench at the edge of a green, and by unspoken agreement they sat down next to each other, close but not quite touching. Salvador took a moment to gather his thoughts.

“It’s not ideal,” he said again, “and it was… taking a toll on me.” His therapist had spent a hell of a long time helping him realize that. “I like my work, I do, and I like being able to get justice for people. But by God, it was getting harder and harder to—well, to do anything, especially if it was work-related. My therapist eventually suggested that I take a break, and I decided to go all the way and resign outright. So. Here I am.”

Salvador glanced over at Freia, who was looking at him so softly and tenderly that he thought he might dissolve on the spot. There was warmth blooming in his cheeks, but also a deeper, fuller warmth in his chest that made him feel like melting.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Freia said quietly, dark brown eyes intent on his. “I can’t say I know exactly what it was like, but I… I’ve been in some rough places myself, and I know how bad it can feel. Look. I was upset, obviously, when you told me you’d resigned—sorry for hounding you, by the way—because you really are the best detective in the city, by far. My life as the Shadow Thief as good as revolves—revolved around you.” She huffed. “That was pretty selfish of me.”

“You couldn’t have known—” Salvador began, though he wasn’t sure why he was trying to defend her.

“No matter how you look at it, I was being pretty damn selfish,” Freia said. “But now I get it. I really am sorry; I was shocked and upset, of course, but that still doesn’t excuse how I acted. So… thank you for telling me all this even though I was a real brat. And I think you made a good decision, taking a break. We all need one every once in a while.”

There was a note to her voice like she was recalling a bittersweet memory. Salvador felt strangely light after unburdening himself but didn’t feel like talking about it anymore, so he gave her a little grin and asked, “Even the infamous Shadow Thief?”

Freia’s mouth parted, rosy pink dusting her cheeks. “Wow. So you can smile.” She herself smiled almost shyly and shook her head, brushing a hand over her face as if to wipe the blush away. Salvador’s heart skipped. “Um—yes, even the ‘infamous Shadow Thief’, though you may find it hard to believe.”

“Try me.”

“Alright,” Freia laughed. She turned fully towards him and folded her hands in her lap like some caricature of a good, God-fearing girl. “Did you know that I took a gap year before university?”

“I haven’t had the opportunity to perform a background check on you yet, unfortunately,” Salvador drawled.

Freia covered a grin. “I guess we’re a bit uneven in that regard, aren’t we? In my defense, I looked into every one of the detectives who investigated my heists. It’s just that for the last three years… it’s only been you.”

Salvador couldn’t resist mirroring her grin. It sat unfamiliarly on his face—he hadn’t been exaggerating about the effects of his work on his spirit—but it was… nice. It felt good to smile and mean it.

“What were you saying about your gap year?” he asked in an attempt to get them back on track.

“Oh, right. Well, in my last year of secondary, I was having a pretty shitty time.” She sighed, looking up at the clouds. “My grades had dropped, and I was ignoring my friends and fighting with my mom… You know the drill. Didn’t help that my dad died not two years before.”

Salvador knew what that was like. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s a long time ago now.” Freia looked back towards him, a small smile quirking her mouth. “Anyway—to use your words, I wasn’t in a good place. I screwed up my college apps and got universally rejected, which sucked, a lot. I almost threw my hands up and went straight into the workforce, but my mom convinced me to take a year to ‘find myself’, whatever that meant. Well, it turned out ‘finding myself’ involved a whole lot of thievery.”

“Thievery,” Salvador repeated with amusement.

“Thievery,” Freia confirmed. “See, my mom used to be a staffer at a fancy hotel, and she brought me to work ‘cause she couldn’t afford daycare—that’s where I learned that rich people are dicks. And so, during my gap year, I started filching wristwatches and purses and whatnot. But it turned out that the really rich ones only got a tad frustrated when they noticed their things missing. So by the time I was halfway through my bachelor’s, I started aiming higher, picking my targets carefully and planning the heists just as carefully. And it didn’t hurt that it was tremendously fun.” She laughed. “So there you have it: the Shadow Thief’s origin story.”

“How old are you?” he asked curiously. She looked to be in her early twenties, but with her East Asian ancestry, she could have been much older. If her notorious string of thefts had started during her college years, that would make her about…

“Twenty-nine,” she replied, smiling archly and tucking a dark lock of hair behind her ear. “I still have a baby face, though, don’t I?”

“You do look younger,” Salvador agreed, “but I wouldn’t say you’re baby-faced.”

Freia smirked. “On the other hand, you look like an old man.”

Salvador resisted the urge to check his phone’s front camera. Thirty-two was a bit young to be developing frown lines, sure, but he certainly still looked his age. “I do not.” 

“You totally do.”

“I do _not_.”

Freia shrugged and raised an impish eyebrow as if to convey, _Whatever you say._

Just then, the wind swelled sharply, sending shivers down their backs as they shifted closer to each other on the bench without thinking. Salvador glanced over and made eye contact with Freia, who suddenly seemed a lot closer than she was before. Each of her tiny freckles was discernible beneath Salvador’s gaze. The bitter wind blew again, ruffling his curls and sending Freia’s hair fluttering around her face. Her eyes seemed impossibly liquid.

He swallowed.

Then all at once, her lips were on his and his hands were in her hair, and they were kissing right there on that old park bench under the cloud-washed autumn sky. She tasted of caramel and coffee, remnants of the affogato she’d had earlier. The kiss wasn’t perfect—Freia accidentally yanked on his hair at one point, and the angle was somewhat awkward as they were still sitting on the bench—but she was warm against him and his heart was pounding an exhilarating rhythm and it just felt… right.

Freia pulled back, cheeks delightfully flushed, eyes bright and laughing. They were both a little out of breath. Salvador took a moment to drink in the sight of her, her with her freckles and cocoa-dark eyes and giddy smile, all of her so startlingly lovely that he couldn’t remember why he’d once thought her _unremarkable_.

“You know it’s a good kiss when I don’t even try to nick your watch,” Freia said, and God, her grin was infectious.

Salvador made an exaggerated show of looking down to confirm that his watch was indeed still in place on his wrist. “Excellent, just as I planned.”

A smirk played across Freia’s lips. “Hey…” she drawled. _Oh, no._ “You know, I’m the thief here, but… I think—”

“Don’t say it.”

“—I think you just stole my heart,” Freia finished triumphantly, then immediately burst into laughter. Salvador tried his best to scowl at her, but he couldn’t prevent the corner of his mouth from tugging up.

“Stop laughing, that wasn’t funny,” he told her, somewhat unconvincingly as he was beginning to laugh himself. Freia’s giggles showed no sign of abating. Salvador pulled her back to him and looked her in the eye, adopting the sternest expression he could muster. “It wasn’t.”

“It definitely was,” she choked out, still giggling helplessly.

“It _wasn’t_ ,” he insisted, and—solely to shut her up, of course—kissed her again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Cruria—I did actually try to write you a casefic as requested, but after 15K or so of hot garbage, I decided to give it up as a lost cause. I hope you enjoyed this little fluffy-ish piece instead <3
> 
> P.S.: I guess you could say the stolen pendant is a _diamond in the bust_ ahahaHa get it wink wink


End file.
